MUSIC REVIEW : SummerFest Opens on a Calm Note

Opening night of the seventh annual SummerFest in La Jolla’s Sherwood Auditorium was a calm, business-as-usual affair. Even the music-making was on the sedate side.

Over the past few years, the La Jolla Chamber Music Society has increased the number of SummerFest concerts and placed more emphasis on educational projects. Friday’s concert was the first of 11 for the festival, which runs through Aug. 30.

Despite the festival’s growth and the concomitant organizational complexities, the atmosphere Friday was easygoing and breezy, nothing at all like the stifling heat wave outside. Many familiar faces from past SummerFests filled the sold-out house, and the program listed familiar names of numerous returning musicians.

New to the festival lineup, however, was the Orion Quartet, an East Coast-based group that has taken its name from the mythological hunter perhaps because it, too, wields bows and will soon be placed among the stars.

With confidence, precision, fluidity and surprising wit, violinists Daniel Phillips and Todd Phillips (brothers), violist Catherine Metz and cellist Timothy Eddy performed Bartok’s Fourth String Quartet. The foursome delivered this kaleidoscopic and pinchingly discordant work of 1927 with all due airiness and bizarre effects. The performance gave the concert a strong center that came, gratifyingly, from a 20th-Century work.

Much of the success with the piece was due to the group’s choice of a slower pace than one usually hears the five movements, thus avoiding fleet-as-possible buzzing and revealing instead the work’s overall simplicity. The ensemble style is tightly cohesive, with attention to nuance and crisp ornamentation--a meticulous bent, but not sterile.

Pianist David Golub and string players Hamao Fujiwara, Paul Neubauer, Andres Diaz (violin, viola and cello, respectively), performed the program’s other major work, the Brahms Quartet in A Major for Piano and Strings, written in 1860 and now a chamber music chestnut.

Notable about this performance was Golub’s nearly uncanny ability to transform the piano into a legato instrument, even when playing chords. The string playing was proficient, delicate to the point of timidity at times, making Golub’s blending all the more essential.

Although the first violin usually leads, violist Neubauer, clearly a highly adept ensemble player, appeared to keep the strings together. Fujiwara, in the first position, kept his signals discreet and played close to the chest, one might say, concentrating on concise execution and the subtleties of his part.

This quartet, with its low-key approach, avoided the oppressively monotonous tendencies of the work’s third movement, when themes, in canon structure, are repeated. Such sensitivity was appreciated, especially because the temperature in the auditorium was rising and the musicians, under the lights, must have been melting.

A bit of juvenilia by Giaocchino Rossini opened the concert. The familiar, lighthearted, lightweight Sonata No. 3 for Strings, which Rossini wrote at age 12, got an earnest but ultimately unconvincing performance by a foursome of young musicians. Violinists Fujiwara and Sheryl Staples joined cellist Diaz and double bassist Nico Abondolo.

Sometimes ad hoc groupings work well at chamber music festivals, sometimes not. Individually, these players were clearly accomplished, but as a group, they just didn’t spark. Blend, balance and tempos weren’t completely assured.